A Useless Man

Who Cares?

Seen from below, the house up on the hill seemed perfect. It was the sort of house that a grocer or a businessman or a rake might dream about during his youth, or a retired teacher or a novelist, churning out great works — the sort of house where an exiled politician might wish, in vain, to end his days.

It opened onto a road that almost looked as if it had been created by the fallen rocks themselves. On a Sunday you might see a courting couple or two, but on other days, it seemed to recede into itself, affecting that odd anonymity that is not unique to roads. There are a few islanders who like to come this way, but even they prefer to walk the road after dark, to watch the stars — or so it seems to me.

On one side of the road is the least visited part of the island: a place where the pine trees grow into each other. There’s no room even for a path. That’s why you find no naughty lipstick-soiled handkerchiefs under the pine trees, or newsprint, or sardine cans. On the other side of the road is what seems from a distance to be a beautiful house: on closer inspection it turns out to be two ugly houses. Both sit on the side of the road, hemmed in on all other sides by the forest.

From a distance you might think that those dwelling inside these houses had come to fulfill dreams of living happily ever after, smelling the pines and the north wind, or that they had come to sell chickpeas or lull themselves to sleep under a pine tree, dreaming of a nation free of pines and all else, but no one beyond chickpea sellers seemed to know. That’s how quietly they lived in these houses. In winter, when the village barber saw a sallow-faced man in his middle years running toward the ferry just as it arrived, he would turn to his customer and say, “That’s the old man who lives in the house on the hill.” What gossip they had all came from this. The old man would return with his arms full of small parcels and then he wouldn’t come down for weeks. And the island’s year-round inhabitants below would engage in their usual gossip and backbiting, until the fishermen came from the Black Sea and they stopped; instead they would try to rent out their rooms to them, on the sly. Unless it was rented on the sly, it could not be rented in the summer to visitors coming to the island to relax and swim in the sea. Because fishermen are bachelors. Bachelors, and also fishermen … True or not, fishermen’s shirts were said to be infested with lice.

It was on one of those days when the island’s year-round inhabitants were struggling not to disclose to each other the secrets on the tips of all their tongues — who had rented houses to the fishermen, and who was to say nothing on this subject before the summer visitors arrived — when they realized that no one had seen the sallow-faced old man in town for weeks and weeks.

It was one of those beautiful clear winter days. The fishermen had gone off to the city. The streets were empty, except for a woman whose face seemed quite young, though her blond hair was tinged with white. The coffeehouse owner was having a shave, between customers, and when he saw her he said:

“So who’s this woman?”

The barber examined her closely, his narrow eyes flashing like lightning.

As if to say, good God, who is she? As if to say, don’t I know her?

“I can’t place her,” he said instead.

The woman looked first toward the coffeehouse. Two local fishermen, both Greeks, were playing backgammon in the corner. The coffeehouse owner inside was getting a shave. After glancing through the window, the woman raced for the pier. One of the fishermen noticed her.

“That’s the wife of the man who lives on the hill.”

And the others said, “You don’t say!”

The woman went over to the harbormaster. She told him that her husband had died the day before, and that her children were going hungry. She asked for some help with his funeral and burial. The harbormaster told himself that this was the first time anyone had come to him with such a request. This was not someone asking him to arrange a free pass, nor was it a bill of goods upon which he could slap a fine of five or ten lira.

“What can I do about something like that?” he said. “My job is to be here for the ferries.”

“Aren’t you a Muslim?”

“Of course we are Muslims, Madam. Praise be to God! But we are also harbormasters. I cannot leave my post. It is my duty to stay here. Please go and talk to the main porter.”

The main porter lived in a handsome two-story house in the middle of the village. As she approached the house, the woman looked as if she had something to say to the flames rising from the stove. At one moment it even looked as if she were standing in a room lit by a stove, plucking yellow — amber yellow — tobacco from a bowl, wire by wire, and relating the village gossip.

She knocked on the door.

Sitting before the potbellied stove with two children, a boy and a girl, at either side, was a swarthy man reading an old and yellowing newspaper. He was wearing glasses. Poking out from underneath his nightshirt were hairy, Herculean calves. One was resting on the other; one of his slippers had fallen to the floor. The exposed foot was extraordinarily ugly; it looked up at the woman, bruised and bulbous, like a newborn child.

“So Madam. Tell me why you’re here.”

The woman repeated what she’d said to the harbormaster. “Last night, my husband …”

“Madam,” said the porter. “Do you have any money? It’ll be hard, convincing any of my porters to go out there in the dead of winter. The rascals just won’t budge! They’re all going hungry. They’ve long since spent their summer earnings. They get no share of the fish, they could die of hunger. I could do something for you. I could, but not for nothing.”

“I have nothing left to sell. I told you. I don’t even have food for my children.”

“You must be able to find some money somewhere.”

“If I had the money to get to Istanbul, then perhaps …”

“Well, then. Here’s ten, eleven kuruş.”

The woman thanked him and took her leave. She ran to the bakery. With a loaf in her arms, she headed up the steep hill. A young girl ran up to her and buried her head in the woman’s skirt. Bread that wouldn’t fill her for more than ten minutes.

The woman went back down to the village. She’d remembered the district doctor. The district doctor was in the midst of his winter chemistry experiments. He’d dissolve his nitrates, turn litmus papers from blue to red, and from red to blue, produce chlorine, do an analysis of his water, check his blood pressure, sniff ozone.

When they told him a woman had come to see him, he was conducting a urine analysis. He had added some substances to the urine to find out if there was any sugar.

Eventually gases emerged from the liquid as it turned blue. Then suddenly the urine turned brick red.

“Oh, no!” said the doctor to himself. “We’re in trouble! Now why did I drink that water? No sleeping now! My God grant us our just desserts!”

Poking her head through the door, his wife said, “There’s a woman here to see you, sir.”

“I’m coming,” he said.

“I’ll make it clear to this woman that she shouldn’t be disturbing me like this,” he mumbled to himself, “I’ll show her …”

“So tell me. What seems to be the problem, Madam?”

The woman told him.

“He can’t be moved until I see him.”

“But he’s not ill. The man’s dead.”

“We shall see if he’s dead or not. How else could I know?”

“At the very least, ask them to move him.”

“I can’t go all the way out there. I’m ill, too, Madam. I’m diabetic. I’m old, the trek up there would do me in. Find me a donkey, and then I could come out. Without a donkey, I’m not budging.”

“All right,” said the woman as she left. “I’ll try to find a donkey.”

As she stepped outside, the woman saw with amazement that the morning’s summery spell had ended most abruptly. A stinging wind had blown in. The clouds were rolling toward their house in the woods, one after the other, like a great funeral procession. She ran home. Rolling the body in a sheet, she carried it outside. It had begun to snow. In the space of a minute, her nightdress had turned white. She half carried, half dragged him as far as the top of the hill. Passing over it, she went down the other side until the ground was flat again. She was sheltered from the wind there. Here again, it was almost like summer.

It was quiet in this valley, and almost warm. Here and there, a snowflake swirled through the warm air. Only the south wind came as far as this cliff top. The north wind reached only as far as the tops of the evergreens.

A bit further along, there were more cliffs. And there, at the edge, the woman stood quivering — perhaps she was praying, or perhaps she was just cold. At first she could hear nothing. Then she did. But it was only pebbles, rolling down to the sea.

It snowed for three days. For three days, the wind howled. In three days, only three ferries stopped at the island. The head porter sat in front of his stove reading two-year-old newspapers, popping corn. The doctor ate at least a bit of pilaf every day, on the pretext of testing his urine. He just about forgot that a woman had come to see him.

The harbormaster was a thin, dry, nervous man. Now and again, something flamed up inside him. One moment he would remember this woman who had come to him, asking him to help her bury her husband, and the next moment he would forget.

But whenever the memory hit him, it was as if he were seeing his own body, dead for days, and still unclaimed.

It was another unseasonably warm day. The barber stopped shaving his customer and, pointing out the window with the tip of his razor, said, “There’s the woman from the house on the hill again. Where’s she off to this time?”

The sallow-faced woman was heading to the pier. Then she stopped. Instead, she began to walk along the shore. An old man was doing the same. He looked like one of those men who used the good weather as an excuse to come out to the islands for a stroll.

The woman walked straight over to the man. She seemed to want to tell him something. Then she gave up on the idea, smiling to herself as if something amusing had just occurred to her, and set off for the ferry that was just coming around the edge of the next island.

She was the only woman on the ferry, and the only one without a ticket. But the number of passengers disembarking at Kadıköy was the same as the number of tickets. Not a single ticket more, not a single less.